Mitrice Richardson walked out of the Malibu/Lost Hills Sheriff’s substation in the middle of the night last week and found herself on a deserted street of offices and industrial buildings.

She was about 40 miles from home, in a place she didn’t know. She had no car, no phone, no money and no jacket. It was 1 a.m.

Richardson, 24, a graduate of Cal State Fullerton who lives in south Los Angeles, hasn’t been heard from since.

A possible sighting occurred a few hours after her release, about 6:30 a.m. Sheriff’s deputies took a call from a residence in the 500 block of Cold Canyon Road in Malibu regarding a woman in the back yard.

Detective Chuck Knolls of the Los Angeles Police Department’s robbery and homicide unit said residents asked the woman if she was OK and she said she was fine. By the time deputies got there, Knolls added, the woman was gone.

If the woman was Richardson, she had traveled about five miles, hiking out of the industrial area into the nearby mountains. The station where she’d been held is on the north side of the Santa Monica Mountains, near the 101 Freeway and the Ventura County line.

The homes on the road she might have traveled are spread far apart. There are no street lights. The peaks nearby drop up to 600 feet. The canyons below are dense with brush.

Richardson graduated from Cal State Fullerton this year with a degree in psychology and was working to become a substitute teacher in Los Angeles. Long-term, her family says, she planned to earn a doctorate in clinical psychology.

People who know her from Cal State Fullerton say her disappearance is out of character.

“She was always very polite,” said Kathi Hikawa, director of the Miss Fullerton pageant, a title Richardson competed for in 2007.

“Some of (the contestants) stand out as, I won’t say troublemakers, but more challenging. She wasn’t one of them. … She did everything right.”

Richardson recently sent Hikawa an e-mail saying she planned to compete in next year’s pageant. Richardson concluded the message with “have a blessed day.”

Bradley Lowe of Anaheim, who knew Richardson as a student, describes her as level headed.

“She gave a lot of thought to things before making moves.”

Which makes her behavior leading up to her disappearance all the more puzzling to family and friends.

“She was sweet, but was saying that the ocean was calling her to Malibu. The behavior was not right,” said Jeff Peterson, owner of Geoffrey’s Malibu, an upscale, oceanfront restaurant where Richardson dined Sept. 16, the night before her disappearance.

Richardson ate alone, ordering a steak dinner and a drink. But when presented with the $89 bill, she said she had no money.

Richardson told restaurant employees that she was from Mars and started to talk to them in a made up language. She also became fixated on a nearby computer screen, looking closely at the numbers.

“She was saying ‘There is an eight,’ and ‘That’s an eight,’ and ‘Eight is my favorite number’,” Peterson said.

Richardson asked to call her 90-year-old great-grandmother, with whom she lives in Los Angeles, as a way to settle the bill. But the restaurant wouldn’t accept a payment without a signature.

Richardson’s great-grandmother then called Richardson’s mother, Latrice Sutton, and explained the situation. Sutton said by the time she called the restaurant, her daughter was being arrested and placed in a sheriff’s patrol car.

Someone at the restaurant told Sutton her daughter was “not in any frame of mind to drive.”

“Her mother said she had been hanging around with the wrong people and that this was probably the best thing for her,” Peterson said.

Richardson was arrested by sheriff’s deputies at about 8:30 p.m. Her white 1990 Honda Civic was impounded.

Richardson was booked on suspicion of failing to pay for dinner and on suspicion of being in possession of less than one ounce of marijuana, which was found in her car. Authorities have not released the police report.

Sutton said she believes her daughter was in a “manic state of mind” because she was sending “erratic” text messages to family and friends the afternoon of Sept. 16. Richardson’s aunt, Lauren Sutton, said she received several texts.

“She told me how much I meant to her,” Lauren Sutton said of her niece. “I called her constantly but she didn’t pick up.”

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The sheriff’s procedure when someone appears to be mentally incapacitated is to get them to a facility for a mental evaluation. But, in Richardson’s case, deputies didn’t see anything that would prompt such a call, said Los Angeles sheriff’s spokesman Steve Whitmore.

Sharon Cummings, the custody assistant who processed Richardson at the sheriff’s substation, said she was “coherent and had no problem talking.” But, Cummings said, Richardson did seem scared to be in jail.

Cummings added that she and Richardson talked about music.

Cummings said she doesn’t release women at night if they don’t have a ride. But according to Cummings, Richardson insisted, saying she was going to “hook up with friends.”

“I said you can stay until morning. …It’s cold and dark out,” Cummings said. “She said ‘yes,’ and then decided not to stay. She said, ‘No. I don’t want to stay in jail.'”

Richardson made several calls from a phone at the station before she left, Cumming said. “She was calling people and I heard her talking,” Cummings said.

Who she called remains a mystery. Sutton said her daughter didn’t call anybody in their family.

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A massive search for Richardson was conducted on Sept. 19.

Helicopters flew over the area and two types of dogs – some that track scents and some that look for bodies – were taken into the rural mountain community where Richardson was last seen.

Knolls of the LAPD said dogs picked up her scent at the property where a woman was reportedly seen in a back yard hours after Richardson’s release, but the dogs couldn’t follow the scent into the property next door.

“It’s all open country out there,” Knolls said, “and we are concerned about her being lost in the area.”

The LAPD has taken charge of the missing person’s investigation because Richardson lives in Los Angeles. The Sheriff’s Department is assisting with the search. At least 135 people are expected to take up the search again today.

Richardson is described as African American with brown hair and hazel-brown eyes. She is about 5 feet 5 inches tall and about 125 pounds. She was last seen wearing a brown Bob Marley T-shirt and blue jeans. She has tattoos on her lower abdomen and behind her neck.

Police are asking anyone with information about her whereabouts or anyone who was at Geoffrey’s Malibu on Sept. 16 to call Los Angeles police detectives Chuck Knolls or Steven Eguchi at 213-485-2531.

Denisse Salazar covers the cities of Placentia and Yorba Linda for the Orange County Register. Over the years, she has also covered crime, courts, human trafficking and breaking news, such as team coverage of Orange County’s worst mass killing, which won first place in online breaking news from the California Newspaper Publishers Association (2011). Salazar has won awards from the Orange County Press Club. She graduated from Cal State Fullerton with a bachelor's degree in communications with an emphasis in journalism and a minor in Spanish. She earned a master’s degree in broadcast journalism from USC.

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